What Writing Does for You

Writing advantages#

“Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”

- Paul Graham

Writing forces you to create rather than consume and gives you scale, structure, and power when you do it.

Scale#

Writing scales infinitely. We used to write on stone tablets and then on parchment, replicating copies manually. Modern civilization began with the invention of the Gutenberg Press, which made mass reproduction of writing possible and gave immortality to the best writers. Computers digitized that process and made it even cheaper to copy text. The Internet made it trivial to spread great writing worldwide in seconds.

For the first time in human history, great writing can now go viral. Other forms of media exist, with higher engagement and information density, but writing will never be beaten in raw reach. When you write, you scale your ideas, your brand, and yourself infinitely.

“Having a command of communication, in spoken form and in written form, provides you with an Archimedes lever for whatever other skills you have.”

- Tim Ferriss

Writing is searchable#

Writing is searchable, and writing lives forever. Search and storage are things that human brains are particularly bad at; we should offload that to computers as much as possible. It just so happens that the most indexable and durable format for storing this information is in writing. Do you remember what you worked on five years ago, on May 10th? No, but your journal does.

“When you write, you become a resource for your future self. It’ll save you time (pulling up your blog post is a lot quicker than a fresh Google search), you’ll get all the credit (instead of some Stack Overflow post), and it’ll make all that writing feel even more worthwhile.”

- Alex MacArthur

Writing controls your narrative#

For people who don’t know you, your online presence is solely what they find on Google. Most people’s “Personal SEO” is terrible. They probably don’t have negative stories published online, but also, there’s usually a lot of random junk from their digital footprint. Writing fills that empty space. If I googled you and found excellent writing, I have a much better opinion of you before I ever meet you. And everyone googles you before an interview! It’s not always fair, but it is a fact.

“If you’re not writing stuff on the web, then when people search for you, they’re going to find stuff that you don’t control.”

- Joel Spolsky

Structure#

“Writing is a tool for thinking. If you can’t build up a thought structure over time and continually go back and rethink and revise it, you’re limited to just what you can hold in your head.”

- Conor White Sullivan

Writing is thinking#

The other thing brains are bad at is giving structure to a fuzzy cloud of loosely related ideas. Writing organizes your thoughts. Steven Sinofsky, who led the development of Office 95 and Windows 8, is more to the point: Writing is Thinking.

When you write, you are forced to a definite sequential order— even unordered lists have implicit order. As we write, we give weight to key ideas and emphasize word choice and phrasing. Links are the Web’s best addition to writing. You can hyperlink to original sources, so readers can follow up if they wish while keeping on topic with what you are saying.

“Writing is a linear process that forces a tangle of loose connections in your brain through a narrow aperture, exposing them to much greater scrutiny.”

- Andrew Bosworth

Writing is meditation#

Writing is a meditation for the busy mind. It forces an internal monologue on what you prioritize and what abstractions and groupings describe your world. You could say that writing defragments your brain and keeps you honest. When you write down all your attempts to solve a problem, you engage in rubber-duck debugging that forces you to double check whether what you’ve tried is logical and create a “save point” for you to check back on in the future. Software that is the final output of thoughtful writing is often far better designed than software where writing is an afterthought.

“Writing things down helped me codify what I actually cared about and helped keep us true to our principles as we grew.”

- Charity Majors

“Writing things down is a medium for self-discipline.”

- Andy Grove

Writing makes others perceive you as smarter#

An organized mind will seem instantly smarter than a disorganized one every time. Because our brains lack structure, we crave structure. My best talks start with writing an outline because a written outline is the minimum viable talk. Just by having gone through the exercise of organizing your thoughts, writing helps you sound smarter when speaking unprepared, whether to a large crowd or a single coworker. You know those moments when a speaker says something profound, and everyone rushes to write it down? That phrase was probably written down somewhere first before it was ever uttered. The other way to frame this: writing makes how smart you actually are shine through.

“I almost never say anything in public that I haven’t written down before.”

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson on how he communicates so well

Power#

Writing lets you explore ideas cheaply. It’s easy to pivot an essay halfway; you can reorganize by cutting and pasting and test out different words and structures before committing. This is because writing is cheap. You can sketch out an entire architecture or business plan in just a few paragraphs without implementing it! The cheapness of writing also extends beyond experimentation; you can also map out hypotheticals and consider edge cases without actually accounting for them right away.

“Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.”

– Zadie Smith

Writing is abstract#

You can convey feelings, systems, concepts, and stories that don’t yet exist. Writing is the ultimate friend of the creator because it isn’t limited by inconvenient things like reality. Yet, writing is also constrained; you aren’t allowed to pick colors, worry about audio, futz with screen resolution or take a million other little design decisions that perfectionists mess with instead of creating. So, you eliminate the paradox of choice and just get going with transferring your ideas and learning to the printed page and digital document.

Writing buffers your inputs#

Writing buffers your inputs until you are ready. Ideas, information, and learning happen spontaneously in a continuous fashion. They don’t respect your schedule. However, your time for creating is limited.

You need serendipity and focus to coexist. Writing things down as they come to you helps you “save your mental state” and defer creating until the time is right and you have enough for something truly great. Writing turns from push to pull.

Note: This is related to mise en place writing.

Writing is permission less#

People with authority have more immediate credibility, but ideally, great ideas can come from anywhere once they are written down. Paul Graham says it best:

“Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote… The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.”

The Internet isn’t a strict meritocracy by any stretch, but it is probably more so than any comparable real-world institution.